Reading the greatest poems in English, we feel we’ve caught . . . something of the world’s stuff—a gown of sounds, the flow in the flower, a fluency in numbers, play of scopes and scales.
—Heather McHugh, “Naked Numbers”
The scale which shall represent . . . the experience of mankind is, I submit, to be found in the proper use of the f Progression and the due appreciation of its profound significance.
—Theodore Andrea Cook, The Curves of Life
One of my graduate writing students once told me that he avoided the sonnet because he refused to be locked up inside “a little box,” forgetting that poetry is meant to be spoken or read aloud and that no one can recite a box. We do not hear shape. We register aural symmetries, repetition, momentum, flow, swells, and ebbs, which are the audible analogue of lexical order and structural design. In the present cultural climate, however, the sonnet—and by implication any poetic form—is apparently nothing more than a satin-lined casket. I would suggest that this reluctance to be “boxed in” or in any way held back is how the contemporary sensibility responds to form, ceremony, or usage. We like to think of ourselves as completely free, gloriously untrammeled by demand or expectation, in a word, as wunderkinder from the egg. This may partly explain our vaunted impatience with the bridlings of apprenticeship and formal training—precisely what creative writing classes as usually taught are
